painting, cones, progress...

going through a little bit of an unsettled phase - looking for an apartment, getting ready to move - happy about it, but starting to distract from artmaking a little bit. anyway, last night noticed this cone, "painted" with some sort of skid-damage-grease marks:






































during dinner looked out at the street, someone was setting cones up, then this guy had a really cool painting tool - basically it's an arm-extender which holds a spraycan down at the end. really seems to speed up the work.







































this morning, met with judson (http://pump.org.in/info/bio.php) to talk about our collaboration. last year we had thought about doing something in dumbo (http://www.dumboartscenter.org/festival.html) but could never quite figure out either what to do or how to do what we wanted to do. this year we might want to apply to dumbo, also to figment (http://figmentnyc.org/2009/) where i'm giving a talk saturday or sunday (june 13th or 14th). he laid down the ground rules this morning, saying we're just going to do something, not agonize over how to make it "great" or "perfect" - we just want to do something together, something we both think is interesting, and let's just focus on an achievable project - we can move on from there, but let's actually do something instead of making all sorts of plans which for one reason or another we can't quite commit to. so we came up with a plan! what an enjoyable and productive session. i had high hopes when he presented me with a traffic cone keychain (seen here on top of a coffee creamer).





































one view of what we're going to do:
































or maybe we want to try to figure out how to work in a live feed:
































as we walked away together, we crossed the street to get a better look at this painted cone - i think a grey spraypainted stripe is fairly rare - it was quite striking:








































as we got closer i noticed it also had grey splotches on it (in addition to the stripe). then i noticed another cone nearby with no stripe, only splotches, almost like polka-dots:








































which was itself near a white-splotched cone:








































turns out there was a whole row of them, one of the more bizarre examples of notable traffic conage i've seen recently, all painted with grey or white splotches:









































which was simultaneously exhilerating and frustrating. i felt like judson and i had made a big breakthrough, a simple way to incorporate a traffic cone into a work of art, while still respecting the "artness" intrinsic to the nature of the cone by itself, yet justifying creating a piece of art instead of just appreciating a cone on its own merits - and then here i saw all these altered cones and wondered, can we really hope to compete with the astonishing variety and utterly incomprehensible variety of cone alterations out in the non-art world? but i think that thought, about "competing," is not entirely rational - i want to celebrate and acknowledge the aesthetic potentialities inherent in traffic cone viewing - there is no reason artwork featuring or inspired by traffic cones needs to be compared to traffic cone viewing... trying to get back the energy as we sat there working through ideas over breakfast, one leading to another to another, each more compelling than the previous, progress being made...